That can spell disaster for the mood
around the o;ce if ground-floor
hires think they’re getting passed over
without consideration. So make sure
people don’t find out about that new
position after you’ve made an outside
hire, says Roberge. Instead, attach
quantifiable skills and metrics to each
role, so your current team can see
how they stack up—and how they can
advance. When done well, he says,
bringing on a senior specialist can
even raise spirits, if the current team
“sees the person as a potential mentor
as much as a boss.” In other words:
less thumb to the nose and more leg
up the ladder.

;

MAKE A FUSS

At many large companies, says Roberge,employees’ mindsets shift from “I’m reallyvaluable” to “I’m a cog.” So call out majorwins often, with formal awards or casualsta; emails. Forty percent of workers saythey’d work harder if they were commendedmore often, according to a survey byemployee-recognition firm OGO. DuringRoberge’s tenure at HubSpot, six tiers stoodbetween entry-level sales hires and seniorroles. But each of those tiers came withplums, such as stock options or work-from-home privileges. “Social media has shapedour collective psyche,” says Roberge.

“Badges and rewards really work.”

HIRE LIKE YOU’RE A GIAN T –

“At some of the best companies I’ve studied,
what’s amazed me is that the CEO is still involved
in hiring every person, despite the company’s
scale,” says Roberge. Playing gatekeeper
will keep B players from getting in the door
(and hiring C players), but you also need a plan
for what to do with all that A talent. “Codify
onboarding earlier than you think you need to,
so people feel like they’re being integrated
smartly,” he says. If you don’t, they often end up
spinning their wheels and accomplishing little—a
sure-fire recipe for dragging down morale.

BUILD IN TRANSPARENC Y –

When the team is 10 people crammed into
one small room, there’s no need to send out
updates—everyone is enmeshed in what’s going
on. But when you have 250 employees spread
over multiple locations? At that point, “you have
to make a conscious plan to share as much
information as possible—what your sales are,
what the strategy is, why you’re making
certain decisions,” says Roberge. The former
chief revenue o;cer at HubSpot, he joined the
marketing firm a year after its launch and
watched it balloon to $100 million in annual
revenue, with hundreds of employees and
global o;ces. “We shared what came out
of our monthly executive meetings with every
frontline worker and published our monthly
company financials,” he says. “The more
aggressive you are with growth, the more helpful
it is to make ultra-transparency a priority.”

MAKE DATA YOUR FRIEND–

Remember when you could take the whole team out for lunch and get a feel for engagement
and mood? As the company scales, you need to replace those gut checks with more formal
tools. “There’s a whole sector of new tech products that let you take quick pulses of employee
happiness,” says Roberge (TinyPulse, Talmetrix, and Culture Amp, to name a few). “And err
toward weekly or monthly feedback. Annual surveys are basically pointless, given how quickly
the team and the company are changing.”

Is that startup spirit sagging? You can build it back up

BET WEEN THE INITIAL EXCITEMENT of launching a business and the stability of running an established
company is a rocky and moody adolescence. For startups, “no matter how happily employees
burned the midnight oil at the outset, there’s an almost universal dip in morale a few years in,”
says Mark Roberge, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of TheSales
AccelerationFormula. When employee-engagement firm TinyPulse combed through sta;er-happiness surveys, it found that roughly 70 percent of startups hit a rough patch around year
three or four—and companies with higher revenue-growth rates had deeper problems. But you
can safeguard your team’s esprit de corps without hurting your bottom line. —KATE ROCKWOOD

HIRE SHERYL SANDBERG –

Or at least someone like her. “Early
founders are remarkable visionaries
who can turn a company’s strategy
left and right, but that doesn’t usually
translate well to setting up an
operational structure for hundreds of
people,” says Roberge. In the past,
that tension might have triggered a
tug of war between the board and the
founder over appointing a new CEO,
but recently more founders are
champing at the bit to bring on a COO.

“As an angel investor, one of the items
I assess—and one I know others are
looking at today—is a founder’s
humility,” Roberge adds. Hiring a head
of operations doesn’t diminish your
leadership but instead “means you
have a right-hand person to deal with
the operational execution that’s
often at the root of morale issues.”

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